SOURCE: Shetley, Vernon. “Incest and Capital in Chinatown.” Modern Language Notes 114, no. 5 (December 1999): 1092-109.

In the following essay, Shetley explores the “double-plot” of Chinatown, concerning the capitalist corruption of local government and the incest perpetrated by a lascivious patriarch. Shetley discusses the film in terms of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic interpretation of the ancient myth of Oedipus.

“The English drama did not outlive the double plot” (Empson 27). By this remark, William Empson meant not that all the great Elizabethan and Jacobean plays necessarily employed a double plot structure, but rather that the greatness of English drama did not outlive the era in which playwrights felt comfortable making the demands of attention and connection called for by the double plot. While double plots were rare even during Hollywood's great age, one might judge that few films after Chinatown have achieved a similar distinction, and certainly that no subsequent film has...